Related papers: Christiaan Huygens and contact geometry
These notes are an expanded version of an introductory lecture on contact geometry given at the 2001 Georgia Topology Conference. They are intended to present some of the "topological" aspects of three dimensional contact geometry.
This is a set of expository lecture notes created originally for a graduate course on holomorphic curves taught at ETH Zurich and the Humboldt University Berlin in 2009/2010. The notes are still incomplete, but due to recent requests from…
These notes, based on a graduate course I gave at Hamburg University in 2003, are intended to students having basic knowledges of differential geometry. Their main purpose is to provide a quick and accessible introduction to different…
These are lecture notes on cut-and-paste methods in 3-dimensional contact geometry.
This is a revision of some expository lecture notes written originally for a 5-hour minicourse on the intersection theory of punctured holomorphic curves and its applications in 3-dimensional contact topology. The main lectures are aimed…
This paper is based on the author's talk at the Grothendieck conference at Chapman university on 26-05-2022. It is not a survey of anabelian geometry but rather exposes some of the personal views and experiences of the author with the…
This is an introductory text on the more topological aspects of contact geometry, written for the Handbook of Differential Geometry vol. 2. After discussing (and proving) some of the fundamental results of contact topology (neighbourhood…
The goal of this article is to survey recent developments in the theory of contact structures in dimension three.
These lecture notes are based on a set of six lectures that I gave in Edinburgh in 2008/2009 and they cover some topics in the interface between Geometry and Physics. They involve some unsolved problems and conjectures and I hope they may…
This text is an introduction to a few selected areas of Alain Connes' noncommutative geometry written for the volume of the school/conference "Noncommutative Geometry 2005" held at IPM Tehran. It is an expanded version of my lectures which…
These notes give an introduction to embedded contact homology (ECH) of contact three-manifolds, gathering together many basic notions which are scattered across a number of papers. We also discuss the origins of ECH, including various…
The tight versus overtwisted dichotomy has been an essential organizing principle and driving force in 3-dimensional contact geometry since its inception around 1990. In this article, we will discuss the genesis of this dichotomy in…
The present volume is the written version of the series of lectures the author delivered at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium during the period of June-July, 1990. The main purpose of these talks is to present some of author's work…
Using contact homology, we reobtain some recent results of Geiges and Gonzalo about the fundamental group of the space of contact structures on some 3-manifolds. We show that our techniques can be used to study higher dimensional contact…
We present an axiomatic/synthetic account of the Huygens Principle of wave fronts. The primitive notions are "touching", and (a weak notion of ) metric. The paper simplifies some of the exposition of the author's "Metric spaces and SDG",…
This paper is based on a talk presented by the first author at the Short Program on Riemannian Geometry that took place at the Centre de Recherche Math\'ematiques, Universit\'e de Montr\'eal, during the period June 28-July 16, 2004. It is a…
This paper is based on a course given by the author at the University of Rome ``La Sapienza'' in the Academic year 2000/2001. The intended aim of the course was to rapidly introduce, although not in an exhaustive way, the non-expert PhD…
This is a survey of contact homology and its applications to the study of contact manifolds. It is a small tribute to Yasha Eliashberg's huge generosity with his countless explanations of his deep mathematical insights all along his career.…
We give a short introduction, beginning with the Kerr geometry itself, to the basic results, motivation, open problems and future directions of the Kerr/CFT correspondence.
Contact structures on 3-manifolds are analyzed by decomposing the manifold along convex surfaces. Background results of Giroux, Eliashberg, Colin, and Honda are discussed with an emphasis on examples. Convex decompositions are then used to…